Call The Midwife

[Homethroughthepuddles]

Surprised there's no thread on this. Did anyone watch it last night or has the series reached its natural end and is no longer attracting viewers?

@Samcro I have the same thought about the babies getting hypoxic brain injuries. Several of the storylines have featured babies that would have been very lucky not to suffer one. There was a similar story in The Royal a few years ago where a baby was still born but managed to revive after a long period of time.

I know a big Catholic family (8 siblings?) who live in the States of whom one is a nun who has worked all her adult life in deprived communities. All the siblings are fervently pro-life, except the nun, who sees what unwanted babies and their families suffer, and the lengths that women will go to if prevented from accessing safe abortion.

We are indeed lucky to have the access that we do, which remains more or less the same as we were given in 1967. In the States abortion rights are under siege, and women are already struggling to access safe, legal abortions. I only hope we don't find ourselves in a similar position.

I was watching it last night with a catholic priest friend, he was a lot more sympathetic to the lady who'd had the abortion than I was. I don't believe in abortion but also don't want it made illegal. I was surprised by his attitude. But he's probably a nicer person than I am!

My grandmother was a nurse in Glasgow in the 50s and frequently nurses women suffering the effects of botched illegal abortions. She's strongly pro-choice.

Iam strongly pro choice too.

The terms gender and sex were used interchangeably though. The demand for the separation of the words is a recent thing, but there is a reason why so many people don't realise there's a difference.

One thing I keep thinking about when I see someone out and about eating. Wonder Doctor was eating a bacon sandwich from a paper bag wasn't he? Was 'food to go' normal in the 60s? I have in my mind it wasn't.

I don't know how many sandwich shops there would have been in a place like Poplar. Sometimes bakeries would have made up sandwiches, I think, not sure how many cafes would have put a sandwich in a bag to take away. There were certainly lots of sandwich shops doing a roaring trade at lunchtime in central London when I moved there at the end of the 70s and a couple of years earlier in the northern city where I lived in my teens we had one near school which I often visited in my lunch hour once we were allowed out in the sixth form. That wasn't in the centre of the city and looking back I wonder where it did get its trade from - residential area mostly, with just the school and some shops, as far as I can recall, although there was a research institute nearby and the university was a short walk away across an open space.

I don't recall ever hearing the word gender until I started studying French at secondary school. I thought it was exclusively a grammatical term until quite recently.

In my 1989 Pocket English Dictionary the definition of gender is has One entry divided into 2. - the first says: (in grammar) division into masculine, feminine or neuter . The second says: division into male and female; sex.

Most people used cafes (or caffs as they were called!) Good family run establishments run by Italian, Greek Cypriot or English families. Pie and mash or fish and chip shops were the fast food options. Poplar did have a few Chinese restaurants at Limehouse at the time.

Yes gogo Trixie was based upon a few people including my friend. Lots of stories in the original books involving Trixie were not her but someone else. The women she cared for had identities disguised too.

Having checked with my dad, who age and location wise is essentially Timothy, he assured me that a bacon sandwich from a cafe was very common.

Well that's blow that perception out of the water for me. I'd always thought all hot food bought in cafes would have be consumed in the cafe, rather than on the hoof. (Fish and chips being the exception.)

There was a picture I saw a while ago of a stall selling sandwiches in 1960s London.
They were all stacked up, no wrapping at all. A stack of cheese and pickle, one of ham, another of egg etc.

But you never ate in the street. That was dreadful manners.

London has always had a lot of parks and although people didn’t walk along eating they did take their lunches into he local park to eat.

Found it, turns out it was the 70s not the 60s.
mymodernmet.com/london-photos-1970s/

Wow, that photo of the sandwiches! You don’t see liver sausage any more.

Perhaps he or his wife, or even timothy had made him the sandwich, he was just eating it

I want all of those sandwiches now misses point of thread

From the look on Shelagh's face she certainly didn't make it. It was in a paper bag so more likely he bought it.

I know a pp mentioned this but I loved the fact that Shelagh diagnosed poss. triplets and even the practicing midwife and her doctor husband got it wrong!

When Shelagh was Sr Bernadette she was widely recognised as the most skilled midwife at Nonnatus. She taught the young midwives. So Shelagh being the one to spot it was right, and she had previously done an ECV on the second of a set of twins so she had form for that as well. It was nice that on both occasions it was her, Dr T and Trixie in attendance.

I was born in the (later) 60s and my same-age friend's mum was told by a midwife "erm, you may be having twins" and her mum said "well I hope so, otherwise it's one baby with two heads".
Based on that, it surprises me that mums and more to the point, midwives, could not tell it was twins, though I can quite see that triplets might be harder to diagnose!

Twins don’t always lie in a way that both can be felt with manipulation. I’d imagine twins were detected more often then they weren’t though. When did scanning become a thing? I know of someone who had undetected twins about 25 years ago.

Back to the sandwich thing. Whilst I thought it odd he had a hot sandwich in a paper bag, what I thought really wrong was he seemed to be eating it as he walked in! Wonder if it was a bit of a nod towards a change in trend food purchasing.

He's eaten on the hoof a few times before. The first ep that Nurse Crane was in she caught him eating a pie on his way to a call.